by Gary Mintchell | Mar 20, 2019 | Internet of Things, Manufacturing IT, News, Operations Management, Organizations, Standards
The greater IT community makes abundant use of open source projects. These projects have proven great worth in operating systems, networking, and applications. The OT community, well, not so much. Maybe some. Microsoft and Dell Technologies, among many others, have donated millions of lines of code to open source projects.
However, the Internet of Things has proven to be one of the places where IT and OT can come together.
Meanwhile, The Eclipse Foundation has been a favorite of mine for probably 20 years. I remember downloading and playing with the Eclipse IDE for Java a long time ago. The foundation makes the news again this year announcing open source advancements in IoT.
It announced major milestones that make Eclipse IoT a leading collaboration of vendors working together to define an open, modular architecture to accelerate commercial IoT adoption. Similar to the early days of the Internet–where open source and vendor collaboration on standard building blocks brought the web to ubiquity–industry leaders including Bosch, Red Hat, Cloudera, and Eurotech are collaborating to standardize open source, modular IoT architecture components within the Eclipse IoT Working Group.
In 2011, the Eclipse IoT Working Group was launched with three projects aimed at reducing the complexity of developing Machine-to-Machine IoT solutions. Eclipse IoT quickly evolved as vendors signed up to collaborate on IoT’s end-to-end interoperability and performance challenges across key areas like constrained devices, device gateways, and scalable cloud platforms. Today the Eclipse IoT community has grown to 37 projects, 41 member companies, and 350 contributors who are building IoT solutions based on Eclipse IoT code.
In a recent case study, Bosch Software Innovations detailed the reasons why it decided in 2015 to participate in Eclipse IoT and the major advantages that open source community involvement has brought to its cloud-based IoT platform, the Bosch IoT Suite. Bosch today has more than 60 developers working on Eclipse IoT projects and has contributed around 1.5 million lines of code. The Bosch IoT Suite is based on the Eclipse Ditto, Eclipse hawkBit, Eclipse Hono, and Eclipse Vorto open source projects.
“We have accomplished so much since we began our open source strategy at Bosch,” added Caroline Buck, Product Owner, Bosch IoT Suite. “Open source development has enabled us to transform how we build software internally and it is making our organization a better product company. Any company that is serious about IoT should consider an ‘open source first’ strategy. If you are planning to do open source IoT, then Eclipse IoT is THE community we recommend.”
In a recent report–Eclipse Foundation’s Open Source IoT Activity Reaches Critical Mass–industry analyst firm 451 Research concluded: “It is time to take a look at what Eclipse IoT has to offer as organizations that choose vendor-specific (proprietary) alternatives to get started begin to run into challenges regarding scale, complexity or cost that has them interested in open source alternatives. While it is not necessarily easier to get an IoT project up and running using open source software, the long-term advantages once an IoT system reaches critical scale are clear–more predictable costs and avoidance of vendor lock-in–and they are driving enterprises to investigate open source options.”
“We are proud that Eclipse IoT is the open source community of choice for commercial-grade IoT innovation,” said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. “Eclipse IoT projects are where industry leaders collaborate on developing the production-ready, interoperable, and flexible open source building blocks needed for the market adoption IoT. Our members are at the forefront of accelerating IoT innovation with the quality and sustainability that the Eclipse Foundation is known for.”
On Eclipse Foundation’s blog, Milinkovich described how–similar to the early trajectory of the commercial Internet, and the importance of the LAMP stack in particular–industrial IoT’s progress is being catalyzed by open source standards and interoperability that allow vendors to drive solutions forward while competing above the common infrastructure level. Eclipse IoT represents the largest open source community that’s driving these open, interoperable, and flexible components.
Eclipse IoT projects are broadly grouped under three categories of innovation critical for building an end-to-end IoT architecture:
- Constrained Devices — the set of libraries that can be deployed on a constrained embedded device to provide a complete IoT development stack.
- Edge Device Gateways — projects that provide capabilities to coordinate the connectivity of a group of sensors and actuators to each other and to external networks.
- IoT Cloud Platform — projects that deliver the highly scalable, multi-cloud software infrastructure and services required to manage and integrate devices and their data. These technologies support deployment flexibility for running IoT workloads at the edge, on any of the leading cloud platforms (e.g. Amazon Web services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud), or in enterprise data centers. These projects also facilitate the interoperability of Eclipse IoT-based solutions with existing enterprise applications and other IoT solutions.
In addition to the Bosch IoT Suite, Eclipse IoT technologies are powering production-ready, commercial IoT offerings from other leading vendors. Eurotech’s award-winning Everyware IoT integrated IoT portfolio is based on Eclipse IoT projects. Everyware Software Framework is an enterprise-ready IoT edge framework based on Eclipse Kura, a Java/OSGi middleware for IoT gateways. Everyware Cloud, an enterprise-ready edition of Eclipse Kapua, offers an open, modular, and microservices-based IoT cloud platform.
“The market adoption of new business models is driving the demand for more agile, secure, and flexible solutions based on open standards and open source technologies. This trend contributed to Eurotech’s decision, in 2012, to become a founding member of the Eclipse IoT Working Group hosted by the Eclipse Foundation”, said Giuseppe Surace, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Eurotech. “The Eclipse Foundation is the place where industry leaders collaborate to deliver innovative and extensible tools, frameworks, and runtime components for an open development environment. Within Eclipse IoT, Eurotech is working with Cloudera, Red Hat, and others to develop key IoT runtimes and other enabling technologies that will deliver an integrated, end-to-end open IoT architecture. Eurotech was the original contributor to the Eclipse Kura and Eclipse Kapua projects within the IoT Working Group. Our core objective is to ensure that when customers are ready to deploy IoT, the solutions will be there.”
IoT ecosystem leaders join Eclipse IoT to take advantage of the following opportunities:
- Participate in industry collaborations to develop common open IoT platforms for Industrial IoT, Industry 4.0, Smart Home, Edge Computing, and more.
- Ensure the quality and sustainability of an end-to-end enterprise IoT architecture fully based on open source and open standards
- Play a role in defining Eclipse IoT strategic priorities
- Gain insights into the Eclipse IoT technology roadmap and direction
- Benchmark and learn best practices from peers for leveraging open IoT technologies to accelerate product development and improve time-to-revenue
Learn more about joining the Eclipse IoT or participating in any of its projects.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 18, 2019 | Automation, Commentary, News, Technology
It starts with digital then moving toward autonomous processes. I’ve written about the strategy ABB has followed for the past four years since Ulrich Spiesshofer assumed the CEO post. We can summarize much of the strategy and also technology roadmap from those two words.
Spiesshofer brought in Guido Jouret in 2017 from Cisco for the role of Chief Digital Officer with the task of bringing digital to all business units. He has made a lot of progress in this short period of time.
Jouret elaborated, “We aren’t trying to be a software company, but hardware requires software.”
Kevin Kosisko, business unit managing director power generation & water, industrial automation and my interview about all things digital at the ABB Customer World conference. We talked about what autonomous meant. “Things we can do without sending people,” he told me. “For example, consider an oil platform taking the first step toward autonomous. Say they must take down a well for routine inspections and then bring it back up. It’s a difficult task, not to mention danger of flying crew to platform and being in the environment. So a combination of digital + autonomous to remove as much human intervention as possible. They took 2 days out of the entire process. That’s 2 additional days of production.”
Two things he told me that highlighted themes I would hear later. The first as “autonomous” being toward the end of a continuum going beyond preventive and predictive. Second, to use the digital twin model to help operators and engineers remove manual steps from a process.
Later I found a spot at the back of a full house for a panel on autonomous—The Journey Towards Autonomy in Industrial Operations Panelists were:
- Matthias Roese, Chief Technologist Manufacturing & Automotive, HPE
- Hakon Berg, Technology Development Manager, ABB
- Dr. Zied Ouertani, Global Digital Lead, Chemicals, ABB
- David Funderberg, Technology Manager, Chemical and Refining, ABB
Businesses in the industrial space have undergone a paradigm shift to move from isolated operations to collaborative and ultimately more autonomous operations. By 2025 we will witness humans working with systems in a collaborative way, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) seamlessly. Disruptive technologies like AI, machine learning and augmented reality (AR) have all changed the way we do everyday tasks and in some cases made them autonomous. Hands-free collaboration can help repair remote issues or predict plant incidents.
The goal does not include taking humans out of the loop. I’m afraid I instigated a post-panel discussion where an editor argued that very definition of autonomous is “without humans”. So, he was asking the usual question you get from newspaper reporters and politicians—are they doing away with humans in production and manufacturing. Rebuttal came from one of the panelists who suggested he look at autonomous as part of a continuum, e.g., preventive->predictive->prescriptive->self-healing->operates with minimal supervision. This is applicable probably not to an entire plant, but to certain processes.
Digital
Guido Jouret spoke later on the status of digital at ABB following two years into his digital transformation leadership. He said the digital emphasis has led to more interactions with customers. And there are 185% 18.5% more customers year over year. ABB gets invited at earlier stages of the project process allowing it more input and influence. The company also has better C-level conversations with customers. ABB Ability should be considered a new technology platform.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 7, 2019 | Automation, News, Process Control, Software
Yesterday I tweeted ABB Chief Digital Officer Guido Jauret’s keynote at ABB Customer World that included the digital roadmap ABB is on including digital twin technology with a partnership with Dassault Systèmes. Then I realized I have not put the news on the blog.
This is an important step on ABB’s digital journey—something that has made impressive strides in two quickly moving years. Here is the news.
ABB and Dassault Systèmes announced a wide spanning global partnership to offer customers in digital industries a unique software solutions portfolio ranging from product life cycle management to asset health solutions. The two companies will provide customers an end-to-end offering of advanced open digital solutions, enhancing competitiveness of industrial companies, while increasing flexibility, speed and productivity of their products’ lifecycles, manufacturing and operations.
The partnership will combine the strengths of ABB Ability digital solutions and Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform, and build on both companies’ strong installed base, deep domain expertise, and global customer access. ABB has already adopted the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to model and simulate its solutions before delivering them to its customers. With this partnership, ABB will develop and provide customers with advanced digital twins, enabling customers to run ABB’s solutions and their operations with improved overall efficiency, flexibility and sustainability.
The companies will, in a staged approach, focus on factory automation and robotics, process industry automation, as well as electrification solutions for smart buildings. The first joint solutions will be showcased at the upcoming industrial Hannover Messe trade fair in Germany, April 1-5, 2019.
“This game-changing partnership will serve our customers to lead in innovation and growth, fundamentally transforming their entire value chain to tap the vast opportunities of industrial digitalization. Together, we are offering an open, end-to-end digital portfolio – from digital twin to asset health – that gives our customers a competitive edge, building on our combined offering, domain expertise and global reach,” said ABB CEO Ulrich Spiesshofer. “ABB is adding Dassault Systèmes to its strong partner network for industrial digitalization, including Microsoft, HPE and IBM. We look very much forward to working with the entire global Dassault Systèmes team to drive innovation and customer value.”
“The Industry of the 21st century is no longer determined simply by the ability to manufacture goods. Today’s leaders will be determined by superior mastery of technical know-how. This is the new competitive differentiator and it’s happening now due to a convergence of digital technologies that are transforming every aspect of industrial business,” said Bernard Charlès, Vice Chairman and CEO, Dassault Systèmes. “In this industry renaissance, a platform approach enables the real and virtual worlds to inform and reinforce one another. Our partnership with ABB will draw from decades of combined expertise to help customers make the most of this powerful and dynamic trend.”
In today’s highly automated industries, digital factory modeling and flexible, robotized manufacturing systems help businesses to generate more design iterations at a quicker rate with more robust designs. This, in turn, helps to accelerate the shift from mass production to mass customization, where goods are manufactured in a greater variety and in smaller batches and in shorter product life cycles. For many manufacturers, the cost of downtime has dramatically increased in recent years as just-in-time delivery has become the norm. An hour of downtime at a modern production site can cost more than $1 million.
ABB has already a strong digital solution offering within the industry through its offering ABB AbilityTM. It was launched in 2017 and offers more than 210 digital solutions to plan, build and operate industrial operations with higher productivity and safety at lower costs.
Dassault Systèmes works with companies of all sizes in 11 industries to help them meet new challenges in today’s Industry Renaissance. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform integrates all the technologies and capabilities that leverage knowledge and know-how into one cohesive digital innovation environment that delivers digital continuity from concept to manufacturing to ownership and back. Industrial companies can integrate the platform’s 3D applications to create a digital twin that captures insights and expertise from across their entire ecosystem, to measure, assess and predict the performance of an industrial asset and help optimize its operation in an intelligent way.
The ABB – Dassault Systèmes partnership will initially focus on:
Factory Automation and Robotics
Digital twin experiences for end-to-end optimization of processes and systems, combined with the flexibility of robotics automation, will give factories the agility to adapt to increasingly dynamic markets. This includes ready-to-operate manufacturing solutions and services, along with joint consulting for industrial business transformation, to optimize and speed the launch of new products. Electronics makers can increase the production of new but short-lived products quickly, while food processors can alternate between locally tailored seasonal offerings while producing at high speed. In highly automated industries such as automotive, the digital twin experience of factories allows an integrated design and manufacturing environment to support new assembly processes with flexible and reconfigurable cells. It also makes it possible to link separate systems, such as connecting logistics automation systems to robots at work on manufacturing lines that rely on precise parts delivery for optimal production performance.
Smart Buildings
The digital partnership between Dassault Systèmes and ABB around digital twin systems will enable a seamless workflow during design, engineering and operation of buildings, as well as connected sustainable transportation solutions. The available information, in combination with Dassault Systèmes’ virtual universe 3DEXPERIENCE, will also allow greater customer interaction during the design specification phases and operation.
Process industries: Mining example
Competitive pressure in process industries, such as mining, requires companies to continuously look for new ways to increase safety, productivity and energy efficiency of sites, while reducing costs and risk of daily operations. A digital model of the underground environment, in connection with mine planning and control systems, would allow to optimize energy consumption and mine automation, as well as enable mine operators to monitor and optimize production in real-time, while running virtual simulations of future scenarios.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 6, 2019 | Automation, Commentary, Manufacturing IT, News
ABB Customer World began Monday, but keynotes began Tuesday. Uli Spiesshofer, ABB CEO, described a renewed and refocused business model. ABB is all in for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and digitalization with ABB Ability, says Spiesshofer.
ABB Ability is essentially a platform with APIs connecting field, edge, and cloud with Analytics as a Service built in.
Spiesshofer noted 2014 business plan for ABB was to No. 1 or 2 in the world in each of its businesses. With move of power grid business with Hitachi, by 2018 the goal had been accomplished.
ABB took three action steps in its latest corporate makeover—Focus on digital business, Simplify organization, and Shape four leading businesses that include power, electrification, industrial automation, motion, robotics and discrete automation. The simplified organization took the company from its historic matrix structure to solidify four business units with strong leadership. The move also reduced corporate overhead.
The recent partnership with Dassault adds digital twin capability enhancing digitalization. Later discussions talked about how this capability helps ABB have customer conversations earlier in the project lifecycle.
The featured partnership at ABB Customer World was with HPE with President and CEO Anthony Neri speaking. Neri says HPE is built with partnerships—some 70% of the business. He told the approximately 11,000 attendees that the partnership of the two companies was a great blending of IT and OT for the benefit of customers.
Neri discussed the importance of Edge to Cloud. The Edge defined as “places where we live and work” is also the primary source of data only 6% of which is utilized right now.
He concluded saying HPE wants to work for solutions to the world’s biggest problems. “We have an insatiable desire to understand everything.”
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 4, 2019 | Manufacturing IT, News, Organizations, Security
I just had an opportunity to talk Industrial cybersecurity with two leaders of The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) (now incorporating OpenFog) who gave an overview of the new Security Maturity Model (SMM) Practitioner’s Guide. This document provides detailed actionable guidance enabling IoT stakeholders to assess and manage the security maturity of IoT systems.
Along with the publication of the SMM Practitioner’s Guide is an update to the IoT SMM: Description and Intended Use White Paper, which provides an introduction to the concepts and approach of the SMM. This white paper has been updated for consistency with the SMM Practitioner’s Guide, including revised diagrams and updated terminology.
As organizations connect their systems to the internet, they become vulnerable to new threats, and they are rightly concerned with security. Addressing these concerns requires investment, but determining investment focus and amount is a difficult business decision. The SMM helps by enabling a structured top-down approach toward setting goals as well as a means toward assessing the current security state, taking into account various specific practices. The SMM allows an organization to trade off investment against risk in a sensible manner.
Building on concepts identified in the groundbreaking IIC Industrial Internet Security Framework published in 2016, the SMM defines levels of security maturity for a company to achieve based on its security goals and objectives as well as its appetite for risk. Organizations may improve their security state by making continued security assessments and improvements over time, up to their required level.
“This is the first model of its kind to assess the maturity of organizations’ IoT systems in a way that includes governance, technology and system management,” said Stephen Mellor, CTO, IIC. “Other models address part of what is addressed by the SMM: they may address a particular industry, IoT but not security, or security but not IoT. The SMM covers all these aspects and points to parts of existing models, where appropriate, to recognize existing work and avoid duplication.”
The practitioner’s guide includes tables describing what must be done to reach a given security comprehensiveness for each security domain, subdomain and practice and can be extended to address specific industry or system scope needs. Following each table is an example using various industry use cases to demonstrate how an organization might use the table to pick a target state or to evaluate a current state.
One example is that of an automotive manufacturer considering the possible threats interfering with the operations of a vehicle key fob. The manufacturer sets its target maturity comprehensiveness level to “1” as it considers some IT threats, such as a Denial of Service attack that may prevent a driver from opening the car door using the key fob. Over time, as new threats emerge, the manufacturer realizes it needs additional threat modeling and enhanced practices so raises its target maturity comprehensiveness level to a higher level “2.”
The practitioner’s guide contains three case studies that show IoT stakeholders how to apply the process based on realistic assessments, showing how the SMM can be applied in practice. The case studies include a smarter data-driven bottling line, an automotive gateway supporting OTA updates and security cameras used in residential settings.
The IIC designed the Security Maturity Model to be extended for industry and system specific requirements. The IIC is collaborating with various industry groups to develop industry profiles that extend the model. Industry associations interested in developing profiles are encouraged to contact the IIC. Please send an email to [email protected]
For more information about the IIC SMM Practitioner’s Guide, IIC members have prepared a webinar “Get a True Sense of Security Maturity,” which will air on March 18th at 12:00 pm for 60 minutes. Use this PIN: 12374028
The full IIC Security Maturity Model Practitioner’s Guide and a list of IIC members who contributed can be found on the IIC website.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 1, 2019 | Commentary, News
Rockwell Automation has been busy since its rejection of a take over offer by Emerson some 15 months ago—something that sent its stock price into a bit of a dive. It made a major investment in PTC in order to have some say and a close relationship to its Internet of Things developments. Then it acquired Emulate3D to enhance its digital twin offering give the inability to form a solid alliance with Dassault Systemes.
Now, bolstering its lagging process automation business, it has formed a joint venture company with Schlumberger. This is very interesting and could stir up a little competition in the oil & gas automation sector.
The companies have entered into an agreement to create a new joint venture, Sensia, the first fully integrated digital oilfield automation solutions provider.
The transaction is expected to close, and the joint venture is expected to begin serving customers, in the summer of 2019, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.
The Sensia joint venture will be the first fully integrated provider of measurement solutions, domain expertise, and automation to the oil and gas industry. It will offer scalable, cloud and edge-enabled process automation, including information and process safety solutions. From intelligent systems to fully engineered life-cycle management automation solutions, the joint venture will help customers drive efficiency gains through measurement and data driven intelligent automation.
“Oilfield operators strive to maximize the value of their investments by safely reducing the time from drilling to production, optimizing output of conventional and unconventional wells, and extending well life,” said Blake Moret, Chairman and CEO, Rockwell Automation. “Currently, no single provider exists that offers the end-to-end solutions and technology platform that address these challenges. Sensia will be uniquely positioned to connect disparate assets and reduce manual processes with secure, scalable solutions that are integrated into one technology platform.
“As oil and gas producers strive to improve productivity, we will bring the value of the Connected Enterprise to life for them. Sensia will provide complete lifecycle and process automation solutions from well to terminal, including industry-leading oilfield technology and expertise,” said Moret.
“Sensia will create a leading technology provider that will further drive optimization of E&P oilfield assets,” said Paal Kibsgaard, Chairman and CEO, Schlumberger. “This joint venture is the next step in our vision to offer our customers smart, connected devices with rich diagnostic capabilities, coupled with measurement, automation and analytics that improve oilfield operations, facilitate business decisions and reduce total cost of ownership throughout the life of a field.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Sensia will operate as an independent entity, with Rockwell Automation owning 53% and Schlumberger owning 47% of the joint venture. Sensia is expected to generate annual revenue of $400 million, and will employ approximately 1,000 team members serving customers in more than 80 countries, with global headquarters in Houston, Texas. The management team will be led by Allan Rentcome, who will serve as Chief Executive Officer. He is currently Director Global Technology – Systems and Solutions Business at Rockwell Automation.
As part of the transaction, Rockwell Automation will make a $250 million payment to Schlumberger at closing, which will be funded by cash on hand. Following this investment, Rockwell Automation will maintain its strong financial flexibility and continue to support its capital allocation priorities, including organic growth and acquisitions, dividends, and share repurchases, and Rockwell Automation reaffirms its $1 billion share repurchase target for fiscal 2019.
